Nancy Sandars

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Nancy Sandars

Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London (1957)
Fellow of the British Academy (1984)
Academic background
EducationUniversity of London
St Hugh's College, Oxford (BLitt)
ThesisBronze Age Cultures in France
Academic work
DisciplineArchaeology
Prehistory
Sub-disciplineBronze Age Europe
Ancient Near East
Websitehttp://www.nancysandars.org.uk

Nancy Katharine Sandars

independent scholar, she wrote a number of books and a popular version of the Epic of Gilgamesh.[1][2]

Early life

Sandars was born on 29 June 1914 in

Boer War and during World War I, and her mother served with the Voluntary Aid Detachment.[1] Through her mother, she was a descendant of James Ramsay, the 18th Century anti-slavery campaigner.[3]

Sandars was educated at home by a governess in her early years, and then at Wychwood School, an all-girls private school in Oxford.[1] She was a sickly child, ill with tuberculosis; this had affected her eyes, but she was successfully treated at a sanatorium in Switzerland.[3] As her education was interrupted by illness, she left school without any qualifications.[4]

Career

Early archaeological career

Sandars took part in her first

hill fort at The Wrekin, Shropshire.[1][5] She had also been planning to join an excavation in Normandy run by Mortimer Wheeler, but was stopped by the outbreak of World War II.[5] Instead, she went to London with Kenyon and assisted in the moving of artefacts at the Institute of Archaeology into its basement for protection.[1]

I remember I stood at the top of the stairs and threw pots and sherds to Kath standing at the bottom to put them in packing cases. She was a good catcher and I don’t think there were any casualties.

— Sandars describing the moving of artefacts at the Institute of Archaeology during WW2[1]

War service

Sandars began

pacifist;[1] she had been influenced by the poetry of Wilfred Owen and her memories of World War I.[6] For the first few months of the war, she was a volunteer nurse at various hospitals in Oxfordshire.[1][6]

Sandars's attitudes changed after experiencing

Fall of France in June 1940.[1]
Following this change of perspective, she joined the Mechanised Transport Corps and became a motorcycle despatch rider.[6] Because of blackout restrictions, the bike's lights were hooded and only emitted a small bead of light.[1] Combined with the British weather, this could make riding a motorcycle at night treacherous. One time, Sandars crashed into a ditch, having mistaken a T-junction for a crossroads while riding almost blind.[1] Another time, torrential rain made her engine short-circuited, shocking her, causing the bike to skid, and leaving her pinned under the wreckage; she was rescued by a passing fireman.[7] The uniforms were inadequate, providing neither warmth not waterproofing; she would regularly offer soldiers pillion lifts so as to benefit from their body warmth.[1][7] The women riders were not provided with helmets until Sandars father protested to the Ministry of Home Affairs; they were then swifty issued to all riders.[1]

In 1942, she applied to and was accepted by the

E-Boats and aircraft within 30 miles of the British coastline.[7][6][9] Working in tandem with other listening stations, they also used direction finding to establish the location of the enemy vessels.[6] In one instance, she was listening in on a debate between German pilots as to whether or not to bomb the building in which she was stationed; they decided to save their bombs for London.[7]

Sandars ended the war in the rank of petty officer, and was later added to the Bletchley Park Roll of Honour.[8]

Post-war

After the end of World War II, Sandars decided to attend university. With no school qualifications, she had to take the "London Matric"; she passed and was therefore qualified for study at the University of London.[4] In 1947, she entered the Institute of Archaeology to study for a postgraduate diploma in Western European archaeology.

Palaeolithic, and Iron Age periods, and also the archaeology of the Celts.[1] The diploma took her three years to complete because of periods of illness.[10]

From 1946 to 1948, Sandars,

rescue excavations in Dorchester, revealing a number of previously unknown Neolithic monuments. By Easter 1948, the area had been overtaken by gravel-working. They used areal survey and the first instance of applying a resistivity survey to prehistoric monuments. The excavation was praised for using the "most modern methods" and for publishing "a document of permanent value which reflects great credit on the authors, each of whom played a leading part in the actual field investigations".[11]

Sandars spent a year at the British School at Athens.[7] She then undertook postgraduate research at St Hugh's College, Oxford.[1] She worked with Christopher Hawkes, the then Professor of European Prehistory. She graduated from the University of Oxford with a Bachelor of Letters (BLitt) degree.[4] Her thesis for her BLitt was edited and became her first book, Bronze Age Cultures in France.[1]

In 1952, Sandars travelled to Greece to work on an excavation on the island of Chios.[4] This dig was led by Sinclair Hood;[4] Sandars and Hood had studied together, with both being at the Institute of Archaeology in 1947.[10]

As part of her research, Sandars undertook a number of trips exploring archaeological sites throughout Europe.

Foreign Office when she returned to England.[1]

Sandars wrote a prose rendition of Epic of Gilgamesh that was published by Penguin Books in 1960. She used scholarly translations from the Akkadian by A. Heidel and E. A. Speiser and from the Sumerian by S. N. Kramer.[13] Her version proved very popular and sold over one million copies.[7]

Sandars continued her travels and research tours across Europe and the Middle East, visiting sites and museums.

second millennium BC, and she published Sea-Peoples: warriors of the ancient Mediterranean in 1978, looking at the Sea Peoples and the associated collapses of the great civilisations of the Mediterranean.[7]

Honours

On 2 May 1957, Sandars was elected a

Selected works

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w "Nancy Sandars". The Times. 9 December 2015. Retrieved 11 December 2015.
  2. .
  3. ^ a b c "BIOGRAPHY – Early Life". Nancy Sandars. Retrieved 11 December 2015.
  4. ^ a b c d e f "BIOGRAPHY – Post-war and 1950s". Nancy Sandars. Retrieved 11 December 2015.
  5. ^ a b c "BIOGRAPHY – 1930s". Nancy Sandars. Retrieved 11 December 2015.
  6. ^ a b c d e f "BIOGRAPHY – 1939-45 War Years". Nancy Sandars. Retrieved 11 December 2015.
  7. ^ a b c d e f g h i j "Nancy Sandars, archaeologist - obituary". The Daily Telegraph. 15 December 2015. Retrieved 16 December 2015.
  8. ^ a b "Roll of Honour: Nancy Sandars". Bletchley Park. Retrieved 24 September 2022.
  9. ^ "Podcast 102 - Collegiate Connections". Bletchley Park. Bletchley Park Trust. 30 December 2019. Archived from the original on 3 January 2020. Retrieved 24 September 2022.
  10. ^ .
  11. .
  12. ^ a b "BIOGRAPHY – 1960s and Later Life". Nancy Sandars. Retrieved 12 December 2015.
  13. ^ Sandars, Nancy (1960). The Epic of Gilgamesh. Penguin. p. 50-51.
  14. ^ "Fellows Directory - S". Fellows of the Society of Antiquaries of London. Retrieved 12 December 2015.
  15. ^ "SANDARS, Miss Nancy (29/06/1914-20/11/2015)". British Academy Fellows. British Academy. Archived from the original on 22 December 2015. Retrieved 12 December 2015.

External links